The legend of the Styx outgrew reality

Today is April Fool’s Day. For some it’s a day for telling tall tales. For lovers of history, it’s a good day to bust myths and legends. In Palm Beach County, there’s none more infamous than that of the Styx. Here’s what we wrote in 2000:

The legend of the Styx has been passed down by oral tradition and is accepted as gospel by many. But the evidence all but dismisses it. The shantytown sprang up on Palm Beach’s County Road, north of the Royal Poinciana Hotel, in the 1890s for more than 2,000 black workers at nearby hotels. The story is that Henry Flagler was eager to oust the residents so he could develop the land. He had it condemned on health grounds, then hired a circus to set up across the Intracoastal Waterway in West Palm Beach, gave black residents free passes, and while they enjoyed the show, burned their homes down.

Another version places the incident on Guy Fawkes Day, Nov. 5, 1906.

Inez Peppers Lovett, who was born in 1895, said in 1994, a year before her death, that she recalled packing up and leaving the Styx but remembers no fire.

And in 1994, T. T. Reese Jr., of the pioneer Dimick/Reese family, wrote to The Palm Beach Post “to lay these questions to rest.”

First, Reese said, Flagler didn’t own the property. The Bradley brothers — Col. E.R. Bradley owned the famed Beach Club casino — bought the 30 acres around 1910 and by February 1912 had cut it into 230 residential lots.

In 1912, Reese says, his father was ordered by Bradley to move the residents out. He says his father gave them at least two weeks, and he remembers seeing them walk across the bridge, hauling their belongings. After everyone left, Reese says, his father cleared the land, pulled up the trash and burned it. Newspaper clippings from the time back Reese’s version of events. He died in 1997.

When Standard Oil baron Henry Flagler built his first two resort hotels in Palm Beach in the mid-1890s, workers on the projects, many from the Caribbean, lived at and around the intersection of North County Road and Sunset Avenue. The shantytown was known as the Styx, which in Greek mythology was the river to Hades. Shacks small and large served as homes, schools and stores. (Palm Beach Post file photo)

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